Guggenheim’s Navigation Redesign
My Role: UX Research, UX Design, UI Design, Information Architecture
Before experiencing a museum, you more often than not, experience their website. This is the first point of contact, the first impression, and at first glance Guggenheim’s website isn’t so bad. But once you have a task or goal you want to accomplish while on the website, the more it begins to feel like a hot mess.
OPPORTUNITY
Through innovative measures, as mentioned in their mission statement, Guggenheim strives to attract passionate art enthusiasts to families looking for something to do, to offer a culturally immersive experience.
However, their website is currently detrimental to the success of their goals. To accomplish this, Guggenheim needs to drive ticket sales and memberships in addition to making their site easier to navigate.
PERSONA
To empathize more with some of the people Guggenheim attracts, we created the persona of Florence, a current art student who enjoys visiting museums when she actually has the time to go.
FLORENCE | ART STUDENT
She struggles with finding time to attend events.
She needs to find museum admission, hours, and contact info.
She’s not aware of upcoming exhibitions at various museums.
CURRENT SITE
In order to achieve a better understanding of the current site, my team and I utilized practices such as a site map, heuristic analysis, feature analysis and competitive matrix. These allowed us to evaluate areas of improvement for Guggenheim, starting with its navigation bar.
Insights:
Accessibility and delightfulness are Guggenheim’s main weaknesses
Recommendations:
Add color and contrast throughout site
Switch to header navigation (industry standard)
Utilize page animations
Update language used for primary navigation (verbiage is confusing)
TESTING THE CURRENT SITE
Our goal for Guggenheim’s redesign was to tackle the current navigation system, focusing on the primary and secondary items. To do this, we needed to complete a tree test, open card sort, and closed card sort to test the information architecture.
TREE TEST
Task 1: You know you are going to be free this weekend and want to explore the latest museum exhibits. Check out which exhibits will be on view this Saturday.
Task 2: You have a busy schedule and need to find when the museum is open. Find the museum hours.
Task 3: You recently got interested in performance art. Check out the upcoming performances.
Insights:
Task 1 outperformed 2+3, potentially because “Exhibitions” is in 2 places
Users struggle with finding Guggenheim’s operating hours
Users are unsure where to locate performances on the website
In hindsight, we should have created 3 tasks that were less of a “word find,” however, given the simple nature of each task, the number of failures truly highlight the poor layout of the current navigation system.
CLOSED CARD SORT
Insights:
Users clearly were unsure about where the secondary items should be sorted within the current categories. This shows us that when navigating to the website they are unclear on where to locate information.
INSIGHTS FROM TESTING
Users find it difficult to locate the museum’s operating hours and performances
Opportunity to condense the number of primary navigation options
Users are uncertain about the labels “Art” and “Engage”
REDESIGN
We updated the navigation system to follow industry standards, which means creating this header menu bar as seen in the image above as well as having direct call to action buttons in the top right corner. These call to action buttons are also great ways to drive the overall business goals of Guggenheim.
PROTOTYPE
TESTING THE PROPOSED SITE
To see if our proposed navigation system improved the Guggenheim site we completed a tree test and a closed card sort.
TREE TEST
Task 1
Although there was an increase in successes, it should be noted that failures did increase by 21%. “Exhibitions” should be put within “Visit Today” as well.
Task 2
Creating a secondary nav item for “Hours” is a clear success.
Task 3
Changing the primary nav title from “Art” to “Art & Events” seems to be more clear to users that you can find events such as performances here.
CLOSED CARD SORT
“Visit Today” and it’s secondary items are the most straight forward
Users are still unsure what to sort into “Art & Events”
Users feel “Interact Online” is more intuitive than “Engage”
LOOKING AHEAD
Next steps include making the necessary changes from our last round of testing, and then moving onto the tertiary navigation items. Then in order to increase the delightfulness of the overall website we will go into into the layout of the actual pages and bring in more color and animations.